


what was there (and what is now gone)

by EtherealPrince



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Erik Lehnsherr is not a Happy Bunny, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Miscarriage, Mpreg, Post Beach Divorce, author struggles, kind of a melancholy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-28
Updated: 2020-10-28
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:53:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27242989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EtherealPrince/pseuds/EtherealPrince
Summary: What happened after the beach in Cuba, and what happened even later after that.It took a lot to get Erik willing to go back to Westchester and back to Charles.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 2
Kudos: 71





	what was there (and what is now gone)

**Author's Note:**

> okay, so this was kind of a 'start typing and see where it goes' kind of thing, so i'm not SUPER happy with the narrative structure of this oneshot or some of my creative choices but there are some aspects of the general idea that i am very invested in, so i wanted to get something that i could share out in the end! 
> 
> please comment and tell me what you think, as always! thank you for reading <3

The door to Emma Frost’s cell crumpled like paper and flew off of its hinges, which were made of 9 gauge stainless steel and couldn’t be moved an inch by any agent in the facility.

The only woman in the room stood from the uncomfortable cot she had been provided for the entirety of her stay in questioning, eyeing the now gaping hole in the wall where the door used to be with a paranoid intensity while her skin crystallizes over into unbreakable diamond. She had just as many enemies as she did friends.

Shadows appear in the hallway outside, and then a dark silhouette moves into her room. In the scattered light from bulbs covered in bars, he looks like the tall dark stranger that kids are warned about in schools.

“I know we’ve had our differences.” He says, and Emma recognizes that voice. She recognizes that helmet. 

Both of those things, however, she usually associated with two different people.

Emma looks Erik Lehnsherr in the eye with the same unshakeable poker face she had reserved for Shaw. Even though she couldn’t look into his mind, she had a feeling that she wouldn’t be hearing from Sebastian again.

“Where’s your telepath friend?” She asks, searching among the small crowd of mutants at the door frame for a plain looking alpha fellow with blue eyes and an inquisitive stare.

“Gone.” Erik says, tone unchanging. The shadows cast on his face by the helmet make him look inhuman. “Left a bit of a gap in my life, if I’m to be honest.”

Emma holds back a snort of derisive laughter. Wasn’t _that_ the truth.

Erik continues.

“I was rather hoping you’d fill it.”

Now she knows what he’s doing. Shaw’s little omega protege _is_ taking up his mantle after all, whether Erik wanted to admit that was the truth or not. He wants someone who is well-versed in the art of mind-walking, and for some reason or another that Xavier man wasn’t available anymore.

It was odd, not seeing the two of them attached at the hip. When they had gotten her in Russia they worked effortlessly together, like they thought from the same mind. Erik had felt more confident, more secure with Xavier, completely unlike how he had been on the boat that night. 

Emma decides to humor him. Prison was terribly boring, and judging by Azazel and Janos’s looks toward her from the side, whatever this new Lehnsherr-headed plan was was not going to be very different from Shaw’s end goal at all. Amazing, how men can change into their tormentors without even realizing it. It was almost funny.

Erik’s eyes are stony cold. “Join us.” He says, and Emma glances over to her comrades to see the new beta, Angel, and the even newer alpha, Raven, with them. She scans the surfaces of their minds--yes indeed, mutant supremacy and separation from humankind were on the dartboard. That was good enough for her.

With a sound like a windchime, her skin clinks and crackles back into smooth flesh.

“Erik, I believe.” She says, even though she knows more about this man than any stranger should.

Said man takes a slow, deep breath in through his nose. His chest is the only part of him that is moving--he is still as stagnant air, in the way that Shaw always used to be. 

“I prefer,” Erik says darkly. “Magneto.”

\-------

The first few days Erik spends as the leader of his new mutant cult-brotherhood-milita are dreadfully awkward and horribly silent.

There was a hideout Shaw had owned, in Berlin, that the six of them had taken over after five left Cuba and one left FBI custody. It was similar to the Hellfire Club in Vegas, but less ostentatious and with more room for people to actually stay for an extended amount of time. No one spoke German except for Erik, but they got by just fine.

He had left Charles and the X-Men with vague plans of a separate mutant state, the coming of the extinction of homo sapiens, and international recognition of homo superior as the dominant race, but after being gone for a while…

It was stupid. It was foolish.

...Erik didn’t know where to start.

Living with the Hellfire Club (and Raven) was uncomfortable physically and mentally. He still didn’t especially care for Janos, was annoyed by Azazel and Emma, pitied Angel far too much, and cared for Raven far too much.

The change in altitude made him embarrassingly sick. The smell of the candles Azazel so loved to light and put everywhere gave him headaches. Raven always side-glanced at him with this kind of melancholy that made his stomach twist. This was not the glamorous life of a mutant rights leader that he envisioned having.

Shaw was dead--they needed to lay low for a while while his death sent shockwaves through the political world, the criminal world, and the mutant world. In Berlin, no one bothered them, and if anybody did Emma sent them away swiftly and silently.

Shaw’s former associates regarded Erik strangely, like a vice president quickly placed in office after the president was assassinated (although in this case the vice president killed the president himself). They were distant toward him, and suspicious. Two alphas and an omega, and all their smells were off. 

With Raven and Angel, it was easier to be around them, but Angel didn’t trust him anymore and every time he looked at Raven he heard Charles’ words to her on that beach echo in the back of his head, and a flame of guilt lit up inside him that he hated feeling.

Needless to say, even though he wasn’t a telepath Erik could tell that he wasn’t very fun to be around for his associates.

Janos, the only other omega in their group, at least attempted to make some kind of conversation with him when things in the hideout were quiet. He would look at Erik strangely, confusedly, but would try to communicate with him by way of sign language and lip reading, both of which Erik was ashamed to say he wasn’t the best at. He opened his jaw wide so that Erik could see the pink scar running along the back of the inside of his throat, and passed time by teaching Erik the basics in british sign language and american sign language.

He smelled like dew on grass in the morning and cold ozone, and it wasn’t a smell Erik loved, but it was more bearable than disgusting alpha sulfur from Azazel or the wistful fragrance of candied fruit from Raven. He couldn’t smell himself--no one could tell what their scent was unless they were told.

Janos continued to be puzzled with him for every day they spent in each other’s company, and after a week in Berlin had passed Erik caught him talking to Emma in private--rather, they were staring at each other in complete silence and Erik assumed Emma was speaking with him through telepathy. Ice-cold blue eyes turned his way, with Janos’s grey-brown following, and Erik knew they were talking about him.

He had been sick that entire week.

Emma turned on a white heel and walked briskly away from Janos, passing Erik along the way. “You’re pale.” She mentions to him as he passes by, and that night Erik spends examining himself in the mirror.

He was pale. He was gaunt, and sweating, and pale. Erik had no idea what was wrong with himself.

He was fine before Cuba. He was fine during his stay in Ravens’ childhood home.

It couldn’t just be the altitude.

The status of his health stayed stubbornly and permanently in the back of his mind after that night, which meant Erik definitely noticed when he woke up one morning and immediately vomited.

After there was nothing left in his stomach for him to get out of his body, the pain in his abdomen stayed. It wasn’t a rolling wave of nausea anymore, no, it was sharp--like someone had punched him hard with a particularly large hand.

Out of some paranoid urge, Erik looked at himself later that morning in the mirror and pulled up his shirt to check, just in case. 

No bruises. No marks except his preexisting scars. Nothing there. The pain persisted.

He spent most of his day in his room at the back of the hideout, riding out the sharp pangs as they increased and decreased in intensity. They were similar to pre-heat cramps, only worse. If those were a five, these were a good seven or eight.

Erik falls asleep multiple times and wakes up multiple times, and he thinks about his last heat. His last heat which he had spent in Westchester.

His biological timing could either be called impeccable or absolutely crummy, because after moving the satellite and basking in the glow of Charles’ proud smile and preparing the recruits for leaving the next day for Cuba and dealing with Raven’s misplaced feelings, Erik finally noticed he had gone into heat.

Charles had attended him.

The night they spent together before Cuba was nothing short of dreamlike. Even though Erik had been too distracted to spend the first two days of his heat properly, Charles had made up for them both with how he kissed him, how he sucked him off, how he fucked Erik no less than five times in one night. Alpha stamina truly was something to be desired.

And then Cuba happened that very next day, and Erik had ruined everything but Charles had too, and, and…

And now here he was. No heat, and no Cuba, but no Charles.

If Emma could hear how much he missed Charles, he thought, so be it. That helmet was making his headaches worse, anyway, and she didn’t scare him.

The clouded sun moved west to east in the sky, and Erik watched it through the single window in his room. The stabbing pain had faded into an uncomfortable numbness as his muscles became desensitized to whatever was affecting them and making them tense. It hurt. He hurt.

He missed Charles.

Barely a week, and he was already desperate to return to his alpha--pathetic. Erik hated himself for even entertaining the notion of such vulnerability. He made the choice to leave Charles himself when he deflected that bullet, and he couldn’t go back.

When night fell on the city and on the hideout, Erik finally ventured outside of his room to dig through the pills Angel kept in the bathroom to see if she had any painkillers. Azazel disappeared into a cloud of red smoke when he saw him, and Emma, on a couch in the sitting room, merely glanced his way before returning her attention to her nails and her nail file. Janos was reading an english newspaper next to her.

Erik crossed the living room silently, and when he was halfway he fell.

Something horrible and deep had pierced his insides, or at least that’s what it felt like. His entire torso was lit up in white-hot agony, worse than the worst of what he had felt so far, and it brought him down hard to the wood floor with a sharp cry of stifled suffering. He pressed his forehead to the ground, with his arms wrapped constrictively around his torso, and hissed unsteady breaths in and out through bared teeth.

Emma and Janos were up in a second to see to him, and a second after that a flash of blue and red and Erik could tell was Raven skidded into the room, yellow eyes wide and worrying.

She knelt down beside him and placed her hands on his back and upper shoulder, looking anxiously between the others. “What’s wrong with him?” Erik heard her whimper, uncharacteristic of the brave soldier he had watched her grow into.

Janos didn’t speak, obviously, and neither did Emma. In fact, Erik could only see her boots from his point of view on the floor--Janos’s dark grey was next to him on the opposite side of his body from Raven, also on his knees. He saw hands signing lightning-fast out of the blurred corners of his vision.

_“How_ long has he been acting strange?” Raven asks nervously, and Erik feels some kind of jealousy at her knowledge of sign language that was dampened by the bruising ache of his body. His fingers lost their grip on his sides through his shirt momentarily and grabbed back on in a pattern of let go-grab-let go-grab. 

“What’s wrong with me.” He growls through gritted teeth, jaw so tense he wouldn’t be surprised if it cracked. There’s a rumbling in the background of his hearing--whether that was the metal in the room reacting to his pain or blood rushing in his ears he didn’t know.

“I don’t--I don’t know, Erik, I--” Raven stammers, and Janos lowers his hands next to Erik’s head so he can see him sign a simple _I don’t know._

Emma is still nonchalant, nonplussed, standing next to the three of them in her pristine white suit. She huffs through her nose in an imitation of a laugh, like that was funny to her.

_Was it?_ Erik wants to say to her, to challenge her. She was the hardest to read of all of them, harder than Azazel, and right now she read like she was taking joy in his suffering.

A small part of Erik says that she wouldn’t be unfounded in it, and reminds the rest of him about the deep crack in her neck she had when she was diamond, but _still._ If he didn’t feel like he was dying at the moment he’d ask her just what that was for and expect an answer in return.

Emma’s boots shift on the floor slightly, and she sighs out.

“He’s pregnant.”

And if that wasn’t enough to rock Erik’s world, Emma doesn’t stop talking:

“And he’s miscarrying.”

Erik’s legs gave out and he fell over onto his side, and instead of being screwed shut like they had been for the past few minutes his eyes were wide open, but unseeing. His fingers gripped his sides so hard he had no doubt they’d leave bruises.

Miscarrying.

There was a sharp intake of breath from Janos; a muffled sob from Raven. Emma sighs again, and Erik blankly watched her boots disappear from the sitting room.

Raven bows over him, and her tears drip onto the side of his head. Something inside of him felt like it had snapped.

“It was Charles,” She whispers hoarsely. “Wasn’t it.” And it’s not a question she wants him to answer, it’s a verbal affirmation of what she knows to be true. Erik wants to tell her that he’s sorry, that when he kissed her back in the mansion it was for her and not for him. She was a tiger, beautiful and strange and dangerous, but she wasn’t meant for him.

Erik makes a very quiet keening sound and curls around himself on the floor. Every single muscle in his body is tense; the last time he remembers going fetal is in the camp after Shaw was finished with him, before the Americans liberated them all.

Fetal is a bad word choice for his thoughts to use.

Raven has one of her hands over her mouth and her jaw is quivering. “I’m so sorry.”

Erik closes his eyes, and all he can think is _why._

\------

“I think it’s simple.” Emma says the next morning.

Erik looks at her from his bed, unamused. He had spent half of the past night twitching and bleeding on the floor with Raven steadfast beside him, and now his clothes were ruined with sticky red and there were cells of human being that used to be inside of him that now were gone, down the pipes.

“I know what happened in Cuba.” The telepath says, and Erik rubs the bridge of his nose.

“Don’t tell me, Emma.” He says, but she doesn’t listen. Something something he needs to know, something something denial is the first stage of the five stages of grief and you need to get over it as quickly as possible.

“You conceived the night before you left, with Xavier. Fine. Then Cuba happens, and you get rattled around in a plane, thrown around by Shaw, you kill Shaw, you strain your powers to their limits, you fight with Xavier, you paralyze him, and then you let Azazel teleport you and scramble all your atoms. After a week of utter silence after all that action, your body probably realized that it couldn’t handle the pregnancy anymore and opted out because of shock.”

She raises her eyebrows and looks at him after all that like the reason he miscarried was obvious...which, okay, it was. That didn’t make Erik any less angry.

“I didn’t know. You’re talking at me like it was my fault.” he growls, hands fisted in his sheets. Emma shakes her head, annoyed.

“I never said that. I’m just explaining to you why you lost the baby.”

“Don’t call it that.”

It wasn’t a baby. It was a bundle of cells, an embryo, a zygote, and it wasn’t even two weeks old when it was terminated. It really couldn’t be classified as a living thing.

But Erik was hung up on what it _could_ have been.

A nursery. A crib. The lullaby his mother used to sing to him. A life with Charles.

It could have been so much. A son or a daughter he could have had the chance to raise. Deep down inside of himself Erik knew he had always wanted children, but had known that his lifestyle was too dangerous to bring an infant into. He knew that. It didn’t stop him from hoping, wanting.

It wasn’t a baby-- it was nothing, it was inert flesh, it was particles. But it was his and Charles’, and his body couldn’t support it. It couldn’t nurture it.

Erik was well aware of the fact that he was broken; he had known it since his mother died. This, by far, was the most painful reminder of that.

Emma is still watching him closely--he wished she’d look somewhere else other than him, for once, for god’s sake. And there was this...this _pity,_ in her eyes, that he had never seen before, and he hated it.

“The worst of it is over.” She says in an exhale, standing from the chair next to his bed where she had been sitting. “You’ll be fine, sugar. Life goes on.”

Every click of her footsteps echoes in Erik’s brain as she leaves the room, closing the door behind her and leaving him in blissful, horrible silence. He turns onto his side and stares out of the window, pulls the sheets up over his head, and tries to believe her.

\------

After the new year rolls around and Azazel buys horrendously expensive alcohol for the group to ring in 1963 with, Erik is fine. He’s fine.

It’s been a few months since...the incident. America and Russia are still paranoid about mutants and are on the lookout for any of Sebastian Shaw’s former associates, and in early February a small woman with pink skin and bones sticking out of her shoulders knocks on the door to the hideout.

Angel opens the door for her and lets her in when she asks to speak to Magneto.

Right off the bat, Erik is interested in her. Her mutation is wonderful, even though he can tell it physically pains her, and he is already thinking about offering her a place to stay with their group (that still doesn’t have a proper name) before she even starts talking.

Sarah, he learns her name is, wants to talk to him in private. He’d offer her his helmet if she wanted real privacy but it was already firmly seated on his head.

They talk in his room. She sits next to him on the side of his bed and tells him that when she was in the neighborhood something...stopped her. It was like a voice, inside her head, that definitely wasn’t hers--and it was telling her to find Magneto and give him a message.

Erik suppresses his anger and asks, “How did you find me?”

Sarah taps the side of her nose with a finger. “I have a good sense of smell. Your place here stinks of rust and sulfur, nothing like the rest of town.”

Fair enough. He can thank Azazel for that--but he had never smelt rust on any of his comrades before. Maybe that was him.

“What’s your message for me.” Erik questions her, and she makes a face like she was trying to remember something.

“It was...it was that a school is open, and you should come home.”

He sighs. They must have fixed Cerebro.

“Thank you.” He says, already tired. And because he can’t resist: “Are you living here? Do you have a place to stay?”

Sarah shakes her head. “Just visiting. My hotel is...expensive, though.”

Perfect. “You could stay here while you’re in town, if you want. There’s more than enough room. No humans.”

She gives him a rueful smile. “I’ll think about it. Thank you, Mr. Lehnsherr.”

When she leaves the hideout, disappearing into a sharp-edged shadow down the darkened street, Raven looks at Erik and he tells her what Sarah had said.

“Charles,” She gasps, and then she reaches out and grabs Erik’s arm. “You have to tell him.”

“About what?”

“You _know,_ Erik…” She trails off, like she didn’t want to say it. “What happened in November…?”

He knew what she meant from the start, but it doesn’t change the dismay he feels when she says it. Erik turns his head away from Raven, and slides his helmet off. “Why.”

“Why? I think he at least deserves to know.”

“It was nothing, Raven, I’d tell him if it had lived more than a month.”

“I know you’re scared of going back.” She says. “Of facing him. So am I.”

Erik turns green eyes to yellow, and Raven squeezes his arm. “I don’t want to go. But you should. I know you miss him.”

And he knew that Raven did too, but she, in many ways, was stronger than him.

He hesitates-- “He _wants_ you to come back, Erik, that’s what the message was. Just go. Go, and then come back here.”

Erik takes Raven’s wrist and forces her hand back to her side. She looks at him unyieldingly, and the tense silence between the two of them seems to last forever until Erik relents and wilts away from her, tilting back toward his room. 

“Fine. Bring me Azazel, please.”

She leaves, wiping a hand under her eyes when her back is turned to him and she thinks he can’t see, and a minute later Azazel appears in front of Erik and closes the door with his tail.

Erik gets right down to business-- “Hypothetically, could you teleport to somewhere you’ve never been?”

Azazel makes a ‘kind of’ gesture with his hand. “If I’ve seen it before. I could go to the Eiffel Tower even though I’ve never been to Paris.”

Erik nods thoughtfully. Azazel hadn’t been to Westchester, but he and Raven had...how could he find a way to show him what the mansion looked like?

After a minute of thinking with his head in his hand, he snaps his fingers and gets up, opening his bedroom door with a flick of his finger and motioning for Azazel to follow him. He does, and Erik finds Emma on the ground floor of the hideout by tracing the metal in her earrings.

She glances up at them, bored. “Yes, boys?”

“I need you to transfer a memory of mine to Azazel.”

Emma gets that look on her face she has when she’s looking into someone’s mind for a moment, and then nods. “Just think about where you want him to go and I can show him.”

She sits them both down in front of her and presses cold fingers to Erik’s temples while he closes his eyes and thinks of Westchester, of the mansion. When she’s gotten what she needed she moves her hands to Azazel’s skin, and after she’s done Azazel looks Erik in the eyes and nods.

“Nice place.” He smirks, and Erik narrows his eyes at him.

“I’ll go tomorrow. Don’t ask questions.”

From the the corner of his eye, he sees Raven watching the three of them from the doorway, but she disappears into the shadows proper when his gaze flicks over to where she used to be. He made a note to himself to tell Charles that she was safe when he saw him.

True to form, the next day Erik gets dressed up and places his helmet on his head and meets Azazel outside the hideout. The alpha offers him his hand silently, and Erik takes it--Azazel was not the kind of man who lied, who was untrustworthy. He was straightforward, and Erik liked that about him.

The two of them vanish off the sidewalk in a cloud of red smoke, and a second later they land on soft grass and packed dirt. Erik looks up, and sure enough, the Xavier’s family home is looming over him.

“When should I return?” Azazel asks him while letting him go.

“At sunset.”

Realistically, it _should_ only take him a half hour to say what he wanted to to Charles, but Erik had a feeling he’d be staying longer than that.

Azazel nods, and then he’s gone again. Erik is left on the front lawn in full regalia, and no voice in his head turns up to greet him.

He goes to find Charles the old fashioned way.

Thankfully, Erik doesn’t have to search for long until he finds him. He checked the living room in the east wing, and then the back lawn, and then a few of the rooms upstairs, but he found Charles in his office, predictably. For once, he was startled to see Erik, but his expression crumpled into one of regret and disgust when he saw the helmet.

Charles was sitting at his desk, just as prim and proper and handsome as Erik remembered, but he didn’t seem happy to see him at all.

It was understandable. If he was shot in the back by his dearest friend he wouldn’t be overjoyed either.

“Take that bloody thing off.” Is the first sentence out of Charles’ mouth, and Erik feels his resolve shatter within seconds.

He sighs, and reaches up to raise the helmet off of his head and then place it down on Charles’ desk with a sturdy _thunk._ Mind now fully open and vulnerable to Charles’ abilities, Erik raises his hands in surrender.

“I’m not here to fight, Charles.” He murmurs, and wethers through a couple seconds of Charles’ intense blue gaze until he speaks again.

“I know you’re not. Sarah reached you, I presume?”

Of course he knows. Erik runs a gloved hand through his hair and sits down in a chair that he had slid up to Charles’ desk behind him without moving a muscle. The helmet sits between them, a barrier.

“She did.” He says once he’s sat. “I see the school has students in it now, and I’m very happy for you.”

And then he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Why did you waste your time telling me to ‘come home’ when you know that’s the last thing I would want to do right now?”

Charles raises an eyebrow at him. “You’re here, aren’t you?” 

Erik falters-- he was right. Even though Charles’ request was nonsensical, he still came. He couldn’t know about the incident...could he? The helmet was off, and Erik’s mind was bared. Charles could look if he wanted to.

“Why am I here, Charles.” He mutters, holding the alpha’s gaze.

At that, Charles actually seems to get embarrassed, of all things. “Well--”

And then he notices the look Erik’s giving him and shoots him one of his own. “I haven’t even said anything yet, wipe that look off your face.” He clears his throat- “We were rebuilding Cerebro, Hank and I, in the basement of the mansion. The test run was...oh, my.”

Charles places his palm on his cheek and his eyes move all over the place, looking anywhere but at Erik. “The test run was...hm. Let’s just say I wasn’t having a great day, and maybe--maybe I was scanning the world for familiar mutants against Hank’s wishes for me to not strain myself.”

He hadn’t changed. Erik and Charles were both stupid enough to overwork themselves on a passion project to the point of exhaustion, they both knew that. 

“Go on?”

“Yes. right. Anyway, I managed to find something in Berlin--just a trail of a familiar mind, like a thread that I could pull on, but I didn’t know where exactly it went. I couldn’t pinpoint who it was, specifically, but I knew that they were with you and your...group, when you left--left Cuba.”

The first time Charles’ voice stutters and halts is there, when he’s thinking about Cuba, and Erik feels guilt crawling up his back again.

Charles continues. “So I...I suppose I just sent out a signal to the nearest mutant in that area, and that happened to be Sarah Rushman, the girl you spoke to. She’s lovely, absolutely lovely--hope I get her here in the school someday.”

Erik resists the fond smile he feels beginning to turn his lips up. Charles’ protective, almost fatherly nature toward young mutants never failed to amuse him.

“Anyway, I was so caught up in the rush of finding someone I knew that I didn’t think of what I was going to do now that I did. In the moment, I was...emotional. I was relieved. The best thing I could think of for her to tell you was that I wanted you to come home. I didn’t expect you to actually do it.”

Charles gestures tiredly, disbelievingly toward Erik. “And now here you are. I didn’t think I’d get this far.” He says with a melancholy little laugh. Erik can’t help but feel sorry for him, for putting him through so much last time they saw each other.

But Charles had put him through the wringer too. What does he say first, the good news that Raven is safe and alive or that he miscarried their child? Charles looks at Erik expectantly, waiting for his reaction to the reason why he was in Westchester.

Erik’s heart makes the choice before his mind can catch up to it.

“I was pregnant in Cuba.”

Charles blinks. “What?”

“You heard me.”

It took a good minute of silence for Charles to work up the nerve to say anything else, and when he did it wasn’t good.

“...was?”

Erik slumps back in his chair, coat rumpled, and his eyes turn melancholy toward Charles. He had been trying for so long to shut himself off from what had happened--he should’ve known it wouldn’t work.

“Yes.”

Charles shakes his head minutely, confused and conflicted. He’s looking down at Erik’s torso. “I don’t…”

Must he make Erik say it all himself?

“It was the night before we left. I was in heat.” He explains, and Charles slowly brings both of his hands up to cover his nose and mouth. Erik can practically see his mind whirling around as it tried to remember when he could possibly have gotten pregnant.

“God, Erik…” Charles breathes, staring wide-eyed. Guilt is coming off of him in such strong waves that even Erik can feel it. They both fucked each other up, he realizes, and it’s absolutely miserable to think about for too long.

“I miscarried back in November.” Erik continues, and hears Charles take a sharp breath in. He must have known something had gone wrong, but this only confirmed exactly what. “Raven said I should tell you while I was here.”

At the mention of his sister’s name, Charles only weakens more. He tilts his head down and presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, making brown hair flop down in front of his face. He doesn’t move when he asks, “How is she.”

“Strong. Loyal. Safe. She was with me when it--when it happened.”

A long sigh. Erik isn’t a telepath but he knows exactly how Charles feels. Overwhelmed, helpless, hopeless. He’s felt the same for a while after they parted ways.

“Erik...” Charles starts, then falls silent again. After a second he shifts around, and...rolls out from behind his desk in a wheelchair.

Erik freezes.

He had no idea. _God,_ he thinks, _I had no idea._ He had sensed an abundance of metal in the office, but had no idea where it was coming from...but now, now he knows, and it hurts. He turns in his chair to face Charles, now sitting directly across from him, and tries not to look anywhere below his waist. 

His expression must be something in the realm of horrified, because Charles gives him a really pained smile and leans forward to take one of his hands.

“I am so, so terribly sorry.” Charles whispers to him at the exact same time Erik whispers “Charles, I’m so sorry.”

They both laugh. It’s a hollow, haunting sound in the quiet of Charles’ office.

Erik places his other hand over the one Charles has on him already and squeezes. “Are you in any pain?”

“No.” Charles shakes his head. “In fact, I...can’t really feel anything at all, if you catch my drift.” He says, trying to smile. Erik doesn’t appreciate the lightheartedness as much as Charles probably wanted him to.

And then it was Charles’ turn. “Are you...alright?”

Erik answers honestly: “I don’t know. I thought I was. I have days where I--where I keep thinking about what they could have been, if that makes any kind of sense. It’s useless. It didn’t even have a brain or a heart when it died.”

Some of his emotions about the matter must have accidentally been broadcasted to Charles’, because the alpha’s expression crumples with each work Erik says. “How long was it after Cuba? That you…”

“Not even two weeks.” Erik gasps, and then he needs to cover his face with a hand because he’s feeling far too much of everything right now. He could keep telling himself it was stupid, it was foolish, it was wasting his time to mourn, and he was about to, until he felt the familiar hum of Charles’ conscience enter his own and spread a warm, soothing glow over his mind.

He opens his eyes and peers through his fingers to see Charles stroking his thumb over the back of his hand.

“I’m sorry.” Charles whispers. “I can’t even imagine what that must have been like, and I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“You didn’t do anything!” Erik says, a little too loudly. He sits up in his chair, pulls his hand away-- “I wanted to push the mission forward. I nearly killed myself dealing with Shaw. I _paralyzed you._ Shut up about how sorry you are, Charles, when you were never in the wrong in the first place--”

Charles folds his hands in his lap meekly. “We were both in the wrong, I think.”

Erik sags forward, planting his elbows on his knees.

He was right.

They had both made mistakes, they had both put each other through unimaginable pain. The irony was that both of those times neither of them meant it.

“I’m very, very thankful you told me, Erik.” Charles murmurs. He’s keeping his distance because of how Erik reacted to his touch but Erik wants nothing more than to curl up with him in a bed somewhere and never get up. “And I’m happy you came back, even if you’re planning on leaving.”

His mouth opens and closes a couple times while he tries to get more words out, and Erik watches from the corner of his eye.

Charles’ voice is unsure, nervous. “And--and when you do leave, I would like you to know that I still, I still love you, and that you are welcome in my home any time.”

Wordlessly, Erik closes his eyes and leans over to tilt his head against Charles’ shoulder. He still smells like a strong, healthy alpha; like fresh vanilla. He absolutely does not wonder about what their child would have smelt like, who they would’ve been.

Charles snakes an arm around his shoulders and squeezes his bicep, tilting his head to the side to meet Erik’s.

Erik inhales his scent, soaks in his warmth, pushes his senses away from the metal surrounding Charles’ lower half and focuses on his watch instead, on his desklamp, on the helmet. Charles seems to notice.

“I’m not any different because of the chair, love. Don’t do that.” He murmurs. Something about being called that makes Erik want to shiver. “I just can’t walk. That’s all.”

Erik turns his head further into Charles’ shoulder. “It’s my fault.”

It was all his fault, as far as he was concerned. Did he truly bring ruin and misfortune to everyone he loved? His father, his mother, and now Charles and Raven and the other mutants he had met last year. All he had done was hurt them and hurt himself in the process.

Charles shushes him, presses his lips to his hair. “Stay the night, Erik.” he whispers, and right now Erik wants nothing more than to assent.

And he does.

“Okay.”

Charles rubs his arm and kisses his temple and they stay like that for a while, silent and mourning for what they had lost but mourning for it together.

\-----

Erik turns Azazel away when he returns at sunset. He’ll ask Charles to use Cerebro to call him again if he’s needed, he tells him, and make sure Raven knows Charles loves her and misses her and gives her his best.

Azazel leaves in a final puff of smoke and Erik finally feels at peace for the first time in a while.

He and Charles spend the night in Charles’ expansive bedroom, where they had slept together back in November, and split a bottle of wine over chess. Erik doesn’t talk much, but the silence between he and Charles is comfortable. He can feel how happy Charles is to have him back, for however long he decides to stay.

Erik had left clothes in the mansion when he had left with Raven and the others, so Charles gives them back to him to wear for the duration of his stay. He climbs into bed after night falls and watches quietly as Charles maneuvers himself under the covers beside him, shifting his legs with his arms. He pulls Erik close to himself when he catches him staring, and Erik presses his nose into Charles’ neck to breathe him in once again.

Charles wraps one arm around Erik’s waist and with his other lightly brushes the pads of his fingers over his stomach. Erik grasps his hand gently but firmly.

“Please. Not now.”

Charles makes a small noise of apology and withdraws his hand, instead curling it up against his chest. Like he didn’t want Erik to think about his legs, Erik didn’t want him to think about the miscarriage.

They were both damaged. They were both hurt. Erik didn’t understand how Charles still wanted him around, but before he could think about that too hard Charles taps his cheek lightly and whispers “Stop it, think about something else.” And he forces his mind to go blank.

When morning came he’d decide what he was going to do with Charles, with his own group of mutants waiting in the wings in Berlin, with Raven. With his future. But only when morning came.

Right now, while the moon hung like a pearl in the sky and Charles’ skin was warm against Erik, everything could wait.


End file.
